The Immortal Cup Season 1 has a unique take on how tournaments can feature only retired Chinese pro players and still be interesting. The folks over at Immortal Cup Season 1 invited retired pro players and current pro players who are taking a break from competitive play, but puts them in a bidding system for team building.
As such, we get fantasy teams of Chinese veteran players that we never expect to see.
Immortal Cup Season 1 (Image credit: HUYA)
How player auction and bidding works in Immortal Cup S1?
The draft show at Immortal Cup S1 occurred during a live stream on May 6, where eight players served as captains to build eight Dota 2 teams. The captains include:
- Jiang “YYF” Cen
- Lu “Maybe” Yao
- Xu “fy” Linsen
- Xie “DD” Bin
- Ding “Dy” Cong
- 老陈
- Chen “Zhou” Yao
- Song “Sccc” Chun
If you’re an old-school Dota 2 fan, many of these captains are definitely familiar faces, some are International Champions themselves and even the oldest Dota 2 players too. Anyway, these captains bid in each player auction, where the captain offering the highest bid will win the specific player’s auction. That’s the gist of the Immortal Cup Season 1 draft show, but there are other rules, such as each auctioned player has a different starting bid, ranging from ¥400,000, ¥200,000, and ¥100,000.
Each captain has an initial fund of ¥2.5 million and has to ensure their team’s total age must be more than 170 years.
Player Auction Results at Immortal Cup S1
At the top of the list of players with highest auction price is Zhou “Emo” Yi, Du “Monet” Peng, Lou “Lou” Zhen, Thiay “JT-” Jun Wen and Zeng “Ori” Jiaoyang. Considering the feats and accomplishments these players have in their books, that’s considerably reasonable to bid on players with such calibre.
Some of the most promising Dota 2 team builds include Team Maybe, with Yang “Chalice” Shenyi, Yap “xNova” Jian Wei and Maybe himself. This roster is reminiscent of PSG.LGD’s glory days in the International 2018 and 2019. Team Sccc also scouted out some heavy-hitters among the veteran pro players, notably Monet and Ye “BoBoKa” Zhibiao into his team. And Zhou, the only TI winner participating in Immortal Cup S1, also has his eye on promising talents, such as Emo and Ren “old eLeVeN” Yangwei.
What’s surprising from the results of group stage is Team DD, which won every single series.
Immortal Cup Season 1 Tournament Format
While we are at it, the Immortal Cup Season 1 features a unique tournament format as well. They have a Warm-up stage, featuring two single round-robin groups of four teams each, where matches are best-of-three. Although no teams will be eliminated in Warm-up stage yet, it determines the match-up for the upcoming Group stage, where the top seed of each group in Warm-up stage gets to pick either bottom seed teams from the other group as their first opponent.
The Group Stage features a swiss-system format for the eight teams, where top-four advances to the upper bracket of Playoffs, while fifth-sixth place teams proceed to the lower bracket. The rest are eliminated. In the Playoffs, it’s a double-elimination bracket, where matches are also best-of-three, except the decisive best-of-five grand final.
The Immortal Cup series is a unique take on how the Chinese Dota 2 scene can still capitalize on its region’s aging talents that once made a name in Dota 2 Esports. Although these veterans may not be fit to compete against the younger generation of Dota 2 players, fans are still eager to watch these legendary players in action.
The Immortal Cup S1 offers a generous million-yuan prize pool, which is approximately $138,000. An amount that’s quite reasonable in Chinese Dota 2 scene. Catch the Immortal Cup S1’s Warm-up stage happening from May 12-19, then the group stage on June 3-7 and lastly, playoffs on June 8-15 on Bkop’s official Twitch channel.